


a patch of old snow

by argle_fraster



Category: Animorphs - Applegate
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes stories have a beginning and an end; other times, like in Cassie's case, there is just the middle stretched between two points.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a patch of old snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [puella_nerdii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_nerdii/gifts).



I still dream about it- the animals' minds. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night covered in a sheen of cold sweat because I swear I'm trapped beneath a building, controlled by the ant queen and the hive mind. It's pretty hard to explain to a psychologist why you are experiencing flashbacks of ripping out throats as a wolf, even with the morphing power out in the open.

It's easier not to say anything at all.

On the nights when I wake in terror, heart pounding and blood screaming, I stand in front of the mirror with my hands on the side of the porcelain sink, fingers curled around the edge. I stand, and I stare at my reflection.

I'm always sure it's going to morph into the face of something else.

It never does.

\--

The Hork-Bajir aren't particularly needy, nor are they the kind to complain. Hork-Bajir are the kind to go down with pride, who would rather be die free than live as prisoners. I usually find myself trekking through forests to check that there would be enough tree bark for them to live on if the colony was moved there, if there would be enough to sustain any rapid growth in the group or a shortage of food from outside factors, like fires or disease.

It's nice to still be involved in the lives of those we had all worked so hard to save, even if it's not the type of work I always thought I'd be doing. I have limited contact with the Hork-Bajir, because it's largely outside of my jurisdiction. There are rules; like with everything else, rules have to be followed, and the appearance of "aliens" had caused a mad rush to awash the entire thing in endless litigation.

But it isn't bad. I'm still doing something, at least.

Sometimes, when I'm standing in the middle of a wooded valley, listening to the chirping of the insects in the underbrush, I think about it. I think about morphing and joining them, of flying above the tree cover to see the extreme close-ups of the bugs trickling between the leaves with raptor eyes.

I can always push the urge away, bury it under everything else I try so hard to keep from bubbling over. I think one day I won't be able to. But until then, I just shudder and ball my fingers into tight fists, and follow Ronnie up another winding mountain trail.

\--

Tobias doesn't seek me out after Rachel's death, after the funeral and the trial and the skyrocketing of knowledge about us. I don't exactly go looking for him, either; we just sort of find each other, when I'm in the woods outside one of the prospective Hork-Bajir habitats.

[Do you think she's happy?] he asks, without even a greeting or preamble, and I just stare up at the blank patch of sky between trees, wondering which branch he's perched on.

"About what?"

[Everything. The way it turned out. Fighting.]

There's a lot of things I can only assume Rachel wasn't happy with; dying, for one, would have angered her to no end. But to think about Rachel I have to put myself in her shoes, rather than my own, and think like she did- get in her head. Rachel would have loved to go out in a white-hot blaze of glory. She died doing what she was born to do.

It doesn't matter that I miss her every day, or that Tobias has lost the only remaining tie to humanity he had left.

"Yeah," I say, and swallow down the lump in my throat. "Yeah, I think she's happy."

He doesn't ask me to keep his location a secret. In fact, he doesn't say anything else at all, but for the time I stand there in the meadow, I know he's watching me. There are a lot of things that I understand about Tobias, and a lot of things I don't; but none of them really matter anymore, it seems.

There is only the one request he doesn't have to voice, and the answer he already knows.

\--

Marco asks where Tobias is a few months later, and the lie doesn't even taste bitter.

\--

I don't see them, much. I hear about them a lot- people are obsessed with our story. I think TNT made a TV movie about one of our battles and Marco helped produce it. I watch for about five minutes before switching it off; I don't remember any of us having machine guns, but Marco's taken some creative liberties, it seems.

He might as well. The memories are better left with us. I feel claustrophobic with everyone knowing my past- especially because sometimes, I don't even think I know it.

That night, I wake up from a dream about watching Elfangor die and pressing my hand against the blue box again. Only instead of receiving the morphing power, I watch as Rachel is liquefied into nothingness as soon as her fingers touch the cool, smooth surface.

I scream until my throat is hoarse, and wake up to Ronnie's hands on my shoulders.

"Nightmare?" he asks. He's good like that; he doesn't pry, and he doesn't demand to know anything. He just quietly assumes the roles I need him to, even when I don't know what it is that I actually require.

"Yeah." My soles are cold against the floor of the bathroom, but the sensation helps snap me out of the dream mode faster. Ronnie doesn't follow me, and I'm glad for it. I'd rather he not be there as I throw up dinner until the bile burns hot at the back of my tongue.

I'm never going to stop missing her. But sometimes I wish I could stop seeing her death over and over again in perfect clarity, in a thousand ways that never happened.

\--

It takes awhile, but Jake finally comes to see me.

Truth be told, I'd imagined how it would happen when I finally met up with him again a hundred times over. I used to think it would be meaningful when it happened, and suddenly I would just know everything I'd never been sure of before; things would fall into place, slip away, and only the important parts would remain, the parts that shimmered between us like silk-spun spider webs.

Maybe I always put Jake on a pedestal of sorts. All idols have to eventually crash down, right?

When I see him again, as I'm tromping around in my hiking boots on another mountain trail, there aren't any fireworks. There's no vivid understanding or sudden revelations. He looks very tired, like paper stretched too thin. He's aged quicker than all of us combined, and I know Rachel's death had something to do with that.

He just tells me that they're leaving. They've got a mission.

It's not what I imagined it would have been. I imagined him getting down on one knee and begging for my hand, to remember what we'd promised to each other when we didn't think any of us were going to get through. It's strange to think about the time before the end- I think maybe I'd thought that we were all going to die, or we were all going to live. There wasn't an in-between, and living with the fractured remainder is harder than any of the alternatives could have been.

"I need to find Tobias," he says, and his stare is hard to wrench my gaze away from.

"I don't know where he is," I reply.

There's a silence between us that feels like it lasts for hours. Jake's always been good at reading people, me especially; I know he hasn't lost that touch. I still feel like I'm fourteen when he looks at me- fourteen and worried if he's noticed me in class, if he thinks I'm not girly enough, if he cares that my skin is dark. He has the power to make revert back to times before I felt like the world had settled down around my shoulders.

Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's bad. I'm not really sure.

"I know you do," he finally says, evenly. His leader-calm voice is shaky, but it's still there, just resting in disuse ever since he lost the rag-tag band he'd been forced in charge of. "Cassie, I need to know where he is."

I want to throw something at him, but I just stare at my shoes. "I can come with you."

"No." With one word, he shows more resolve than he's displayed the whole conversation. "Your part is over. Stay here; you're needed."

I shouldn't tell him. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help it, because it's Jake. It's always been Jake, and even when it's not anymore- somewhere, somehow, it still is.

When he leaves, I spend a long time thinking about what it would feel like to become a wolf again, and follow him through the woods using his scent as a tracking device.

\--

It takes awhile for information to filter down that the ship is gone.

It's even harder to get any specifics; my friends were on that ship, my comrades, and the most I can dig up is that "they encountered an unknown vessel and transmissions with them were lost".

I know what that means. I'm not stupid.

Ronnie finds me sitting on the bed with my head in my hands. His hands are on my back, soothing and warm, but it doesn't stop the shakes wracking my body. It's hard to breathe, like when you walk out into air so cold it steals all the air away.

"It'll be okay," he says, like a mother says to a child who's had a nightmare. "It'll be okay."

I can't even cry. I just sit and shake, and shake, because they are all gone, and it's just me. I'm the only one left.

And I think that's worse than if there had been none.

\--

It used to be easy to bury myself in work, but the Hork-Bajir aren't just a job; they are a constant, living and breathing reminder of everything I have lost. I think about them, and all I can see are their faces- Rachel's in determination, Jake's in grim resolution, Marco's in his perpetual smirk. They haunt my dreams.

I allow the paperwork to rule my life for a month, until I can hardly stand to be in a building anymore, and am itching to be outside once more.

As dusk settles over the city, I take the slender stairwell to the roof and stand there, staring out at the setting sun. It's cool, but not overly so. I strip off my shirt and jeans until I'm standing there in a wife beater and my underwear, looking out over the buildings below and the people within. It's been too long, but it's not hard to feel the ripple under my skin again.

I focus on the osprey.

Having wings again is like tasting sugar for the first time in years- exhilarating and wild, pulsing in my veins.

I fly.

\--

I'm not sure how I remember the location of the free Hork-Bajir camp we'd spent so much time in- it's been moved several times, to safer and more bountiful locations, but the settlement is largely made up of the same Hork-Bajir we had helped to free.

Toby doesn't seem surprised to see me. She never had been, anyway.

"Cassie," she says, when I demorph and find shaky footing in the hills once more, trembling and shivering at the cold sting of the mountain air. It's harsher than I remember it being.

"Does it get better?" I ask, teeth clattering. "It has to get better. You know, don't you? About the others."

Toby doesn't answer.

I half-stumble down and collapse on a rock, wrapping my arms around my knees and tugging them towards my chest. It's all I can do to keep breathing, to fight against the onslaught of grief, the waves that feel just as strong as they did when I first heard the news. It hasn't diminished; if anything, it's gotten worse.

"I shouldn't have told him where Tobias was," I whisper.

Toby is silent for awhile, and then she turns her face up to the sky. "I think he wanted to go."

"Does it get better?" I ask again.

"Yes," she says.

I can't tell if she's only saying that to placate me, or because she believes it to be true. I'm not sure it matters. I stay until I can't handle the cold anymore, and then I remorph and fly back.

Ronnie is sleeping when I return, but I don't join him. I sit out on the balcony of the apartment we share and watch the sunrise, staining the sky with mottled shades of red.

\--

The next day, Ronnie pauses while his hands hover over my hiking boots, which have sat unused and unworn for the last month.

"Did you want to come with me today?" he asks.

I look at him, and think of Rachel, all guts and glory; of Marco, with his sarcasm used as self-preservation; of Jake, and the way he always made my insides glow. Tobias and his gentleness, Ax and his simplicity.

Maybe it's not so bad to be the last one. Maybe this way, I can still carry on the legacy.

"Yeah," I reply, and I reach out to take my boots. "I think I will."


End file.
